More
from and aboutFrederick Buechner(biographical info at bottom of page)

You
can survive on your own; you can grow strong on your own;
you can prevail on your own; but you cannot become human on your
own.

The
life that I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and
that
in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in
what far place my touch will be felt.

You can kiss your
family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the
same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your
stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives
in you.

Listen to your life.
See it for the fathomless mystery
that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than
in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your
way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the
last analysis all moments are key moments, and life
itself is grace.

Grace is
something you can never get but only be given. The grace
of God means something like: Here is your life. You might
never have
been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been
complete
without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible
things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate
us. It's for
you. I created the universe. I love you. There's only one
catch. Like
any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you
reach out
and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a
gift too.

True
patriots are no longer champions of Democracy, Communism, or
anything
like that but champions of the Human Race. It is not the Homeland
that they
feel called on to defend at any cost but the planet Earth as Home.
If in the
interests of making sure we don't blow ourselves off the map once
and for
all, we end up relinquishing a measure of national sovereignty to
some
international body, so much the worse for national sovereignty.
There is only
one Sovereignty that matters ultimately, and it is of another sort
altogether.

The place God calls you to is where your deep
gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

There's
no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more
than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream
or earn good looks or bring about your own birth. [Speaking of
grace.]

Your
life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into
wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you,
there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see
reality—not as we expect it to be but as it is—is to see that
unless we live for each other and in and through each other,
we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really
be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

The
love for equals is a human thing—of friend for friend, brother
for brother.
It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles. The
love for the less
fortunate is a beautiful thing—the love for those who suffer,
for those
who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is
compassion, and it
touches the heart of the world. The love for the more fortunate is
a rare
thing—to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice
without envy
with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the
black man
for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints.
And then
there is the love for the enemy—the love for the one who does
not love
you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love
for the
torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world.

Frederick
Buechner was born on July 11, 1926, the oldest of two children
of Katherine Kuhn and Carl Frederick Buechner, Sr. He was
named after
his father, who committed suicide when Frederick was 10. As
the senior
Buechner took new jobs, the family moved from residences in New
York
City to Bermuda to North Carolina. As a child, the younger
Buechner was particularly fond of the Oz fantasies by L. Frank
Baum; much later he would retell the journey to the Emerald City
in his novel, Entrance to
Porlock (1970).

In 1941, during their stay in North Carolina, Frederick attended
boarding school in Lawrenceville, there deciding that he wanted to
write
professionally. Here, also, he met the poet James Merrill,
with
whom he established a lifelong friendship. “Together,” writes
Buechner, “we were a match for the world.” After
Lawrenceville,
Buechner pursued studies at Princeton University until WW II
interrupted. He served two years in the military (1944-46),
then
returned to Princeton where he received his Bachelor of Arts
degree in
1947.

A year later in 1948, he returned to Lawrenceville as a teacher in
the
English Department. Two years later he published his first
novel, A Long
Day’s Dying, to great critical acclaim, and resigned from
his teaching
position in 1953. Secure in his new success, he moved in
1953 to New
York City “…to be a full-time writer, only to discover that I
could
not write a word.” He attended Madison Avenue Presbyterian
Church,
pastored by George Buttrick, “…whose extraordinary sermons,”
recalls Buechner, “had played such a crucial part in my turning to
Christianity…”

Following Buttrick’s suggestion, Buechner attended Union
Theological
Seminary where he studied under theologians Reinhold Neibuhr, Paul
Tillich and James Muilenburg. Again his education was
interrupted, this
time willingly. He took a year sabbatical to travel, write The
Return of
Ansel Gibbs – and soon fell in love with Judith Fredericke
Merck, whom
he married.

He returned to Union Theological Seminary for the final two years
to
complete his Bachelor of Divinity Degree, which he received in
1958. After that, he was ordained as an evangelist in George
Buttrick’s
church. Although “evangelist” was his official
designation, Buechner
preferred the word apologist to describe his vocation, “My
job…was to
present the faith as appealingly, honestly, relevantly and
skillfully as
I could.” And he would accomplish this through his
writing.

Following ordination, Buechner accepted an offer to inaugurate a
full-time religious program at Philips Exeter Academy of New
Hampshire,
the position expanding to duties as school minister.
Buechner taught nine years at Exeter (1958-1967). His family, now
including three daughters, often took their vacations in
Vermont. Departing Exeter, he moved to a farm in Vermont
where he commenced his career as a full-time writer and speaker.

In 1985, Buechner accepted an invitation to teach a semester of
literature at Wheaton College, his first full-on exposure to
Evangelicalism. There he attended nearby St. Barnabas, “an
extraordinary church,” he writes in his memoirs, “…full of
shadows,
full of secrets.”

Thus far, Frederick Buechner has composed three memoirs: The
Sacred
Journey (1982); Now and Then (1983); and Telling
Secrets (1991). Still
writing and occasionally lecturing, he and his wife divide their
time
between Vermont and Florida.

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